A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published.
… Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille’s Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired.
“Why it took more than four-and-a-half years after the study was initially published for the journal to come to this conclusion is not clear. It is also somewhat surprising that most of the paper’s authors still stand by study’s findings and conclusions despite its obvious inconsistencies, methodological flaws and potential ethical issues as outlined in the retraction note,” says Søgaard.
The paper (now marked as retracted): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949
I assume it took that long because good science is rarely fast and fast science is rarely good
The Covid vaccines were fast and good.
They were remarkably fast for a vaccine, they were effective and also the most unpleasant vaccine I’ve had. And they involved the industrialized world dumping huge amounts of resources into their creation. They also took significantly longer than the study proposing hydrocychloroquine. The study refuting it wasn’t on a timer so it was able to take it slow and go at the pace of normal science.
Yes, but also we were incredibly lucky that most of the technology already existed. If covid happened 5 years prior, we would not have those vaccines.
The paper linking vaccines with autism was also retracted, and that didn’t stop them.
People are not bright. If a source they trust says something is bad, it’s hard to back track.
Shit, a lot of people still think egg yokes substantially increase blood cholesterol.
And that dietary fat gets applied immediately as body fat. No conversion necessary. No strong feelings on sugar intake.
Unfortunately… Isn’t there a saying like “the amount of effort to refute bullshit is much large than the amount needed to produce it” or something? So sadly the HCQ thing is just going to stay there for now; the journal taking 4.5 years to retract it didn’t help either
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Andrew Wakefield has a lot to answer for.
“they’re hiding the truth”, that’s what fuels conspiracy theories.
More proof that hydroxychloroquine is a miracle drug and the lizard people just don’t want us to know about it.
I mean, it is an awesome drug! I use it a lot. Even in covid suffers - when COVID activates an autoimmune disease.
Let’s do ivermectin next! I’ll go first: fantastic for endo and ectoparasites, and even a subset of folks with rosacea. Does jack all for Covid infections.
Yeah ivermectin is a miracle drug …in antiparasitic medicine. Virology not so much
I…. Isn’t that what I said?
Agree… So many people are so far gone from logic that anything and everything either proves them right or is a conspiracy. Guess free education is important in a society that wants to remain just this… A society of people living and functioning together. We are entering the “find out” phase
It’s a miracle drug but only if you’re a lizard person. You need that zeta reticulan biology for it to work.
I still don’t get why the higher ups pushed this and Ivermectin so hard. Like, they clearly aren’t anti big pharma, so it must be someone getting their beak wet. But who?
They wanted you to go back to work, not in X months if and when a vaccine was available, but tomorrow, taking some bullshit drug if you needed reassurance. While they were happy working from home, triple vaxxed and double masked.
I don’t know what the intent was, only what it achieved. It is now political suicide to enforce public health mandates, so when the next pandemic hits, your boss will be able to force you to go to work in unsafe sanitary conditions and a lot of people will be cheering for it.
If you remember the time, Trump was pushing for any narrative that could let him say COVID wasn’t a big deal and would just disappear. He was looking for easy answers.
He was looking for easy answers.
This is fucking everyone and it’s so goddamn bleak.
Yeah that’s the problem with people in leadership roles. They should know better than to think complex problems have easy solutions.
Unfortunately, a lot of the voting public gravitate towards the leaders that assure them there are easy answers. The average person doesn’t want to hear a nuanced answer to a complex issue.
Hanlon’s razor
You want a conspiracy theory?
It was designed to make any criticism of big pharma look crazy.
Which it also didn’t do. Nobody “trusts” “big Pharma”. They trust doctors, scientists, and the regulatory bodies that oversee them.
The damage is done. The conspiracy nuts will just believe that the all mysterious “they” are trying to hide research.
lol, all you can do is laugh. crying, yelling, pleading, recitation of observable fact, nothing will move the needle for the morons who think that any solution which assists both white people and brown people equally must be evil to be defeated
nothing will move the needle for the morons
It’s quite easy to move their needle, just have trump tell them something and they’ll fight to the death to defend whatever dumb ass thing he told them.
Not really. Trump just adjusts his story when he notices it’s not well received. He even started to promote getting vaccinated to keep his base from dieing, noticed the pushback and changed his message to anti-vax again.
He’s the reason they were opposed to preventative measures in the first place. What a loser.
That’s how he runs. It’s like those people “summoning spirits” doing a cold reading, but in a much larger scale.
“I sense you are bothered by roads, airplanes, children, jobs”
“Yes, jobs. How did you know?”
“And it’s all the fault of trees, donkeys, cars, doctors, immigrants.”
“I really hate immigrants.”
“so we’ll build a bicycle, sidewalk, front door, barbed wire, a wall”
“Oh yes, we need a wall to keep them out. This guy is really telling it like it is.”
When asked later why he suggested a bicycle, this is vehemently denied even when recordings are shown.
There’s also a feedback loop. He rants about what they want to hear and they worry about what he tells them to worry about frequently enough. This is how people who had been afraid of immigrants but otherwise normal wind up terrified of antifa and queer people making them stop eating meat. And while this is happening there are people like Steve bannon who’ve been intentionally developing techniques to indoctrinate people to the far right.
What are you even talking about? I can’t tell if you’re for or against the retraction of this obviously flawed study.
Pretty sure they are saying that vaccines are proven to help everyone, and that morons (RFK Jr, etc.) want to destroy them because vaccines helps black people.
I hope that is what they are saying.
Yes, the comment could use some light editing (and capitalization) but that’s correct.
It did what it needed to.
Now that the damage is done, they can pretend to have integrity again to convince people to believe them when they publish the next “miracle study”.
Why is it that people sneer at non-medical doctors? Far more fraud is committed by the bois with stethoscopes around their shoulders. People be falling for that bedside rizz and getting played like a fiddle.
I’ve never seen people sneer at doctors of physics talking about physics or doctors of medieval literature discussing the influences on chaucer (though they do get routinely mocked for thinking themselves employable).
What people do sneer at is doctors of electrical engineering claiming that they’ve disproven speciation by evolution and doctors of law declaring medical establishment wrong about medicine.
A doctorate just means you’re an expert at something not everything
A medical doctor is a well regarded and well numerated profession. They are pillars of society. They are trusted and revered in a way that teachers rarely are. The status of a doctor in the field of computer science or engineering is not much more than someone with a common or garden degree. Nobody knows what a research question is or how science is advanced. Everyone knows House and Grays Anatomy. Fuck those fake doctors with their models and predictive power. We don’t revere truth tellers, we revere celebrity. We want dat bedside rizz. That’s how Dr Shipman killed us. That’s why Professor Nutt was fired from his post.
Who sneers at non-medical doctors?
I don’t read things clearly.
